UPDATED: Neo-Nazi group plans to 'storm' Capitol

The National Socialist Movement, a Detroit-based neo-Nazi group, is planning a rally at the Capitol April 21, according to its website.

The rally will focus on illegal immigration, white civil rights, crime, the recession and other topics, the group announced. The rally is being coordinated by the NSM’s Kentucky branch.

On its website, the group posted a black-and-white picture of the Capitol beneath a large, red cloud alongside the NSM’s emblem, an American flag spliced with a swastika. The picture’s text says the group plans to “storm” the Capitol.

NSM is a political party and the largest neo-Nazi group in the country with 61 chapters in 35 states as of 2009, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.

It’s aimed at “defending the rights of white people everywhere,” “promotion of white separation” and demanding “all non-whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force,” according to its website.

The group also advocates for a nation without Jews, homosexuals, the United Nations, NATO and NAFTA, among other things.

Gov. Steve Beshear, in a statement Wednesday, said he would honor NSM's right to free speech and assembly but called the group "hate-filled."

"This group should know that their ideology is reprehensible to Kentuckians and that Kentukcy is a tolerant, progressive and welcoming state for all people," Beshear said.

In the aftermath of the February shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., the group announced it would organize armed patrols in the Florida community in anticipation of racial violence.

“As citizens and neighbors dissolve along racial lines, the possibility of further racial violence in the melting pot is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets,” NSM said on its website in announcing the patrols in March.

However, in a Sunday story on the Miami NewTimes website, the Sanford Police Department says it has seen no evidence of neo-Nazis patrolling the community. The department also has not seen signs of the New Black Panther Party, which NSM claimed put a $10,000 reward for the citizen arrest of George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch volunteer who killed Martin.

NSM has posted pictures of a man and woman on patrol wearing black and, in one photo, holding the NSM’s flag. In another, the pair is standing in front of Sanford’s municipal Recreation Department. Both photos were dated Tuesday.

The NSM could not be reached for comment. A call to the phone number listed on its website went to a promotional recording.

The State Journal edited this story to add Gov. Steve Beshear's comments.